Dead Wrong. Janice Kay Johnson

manager for the football and baseball teams. Will hadn’t liked to crush the guy, but he never seemed to notice when he wasn’t welcome.

      Heck, maybe that made him the salesman of the century. Successful real estate agents had to be damn pushy.

      Jimmy was still scrawny and still able to make Will uncomfortable by doing things like slinging an arm around his shoulder when he introduced him to people and implying that they’d been best friends in high school.

      “Hey,” he said. “Did you hear about Amy? I saw Travis this morning. He told me.”

      Will had been hoping the caller was his mother with news.

      After he and Jimmy hashed over the news for a couple of minutes, with Will pretending he didn’t know any more than anyone else did, McCartin asked, “Did you think any more about that house at Crescent Ridge? If you buy now, you could pick your own tile, paint colors, maybe upgrade some fixtures.”

      The new development he was talking about was maybe half a mile from Will’s mother’s place, just off the mountain loop highway on the way up to Juanita Butte. The handful of houses that had been framed in so far were going to be beauties. Different builders were working there, which avoided the cookie-cutter effect, too. There was a shingled one at the top of the ridge that Will had liked.

      “It’s just too big,” he said. “What was it, thirty-five hundred square feet? I don’t have any use for a place that size.”

      “You could think about buying a lot and getting one custom built,” McCartin suggested.

      “Yeah, but then I’d be looking at next fall before I had a place to live.” He got cream out of the refrigerator and poured some into his coffee, cell phone to his ear. “I don’t know. I’ll keep the house in mind, Jimmy, but I’m thinking I’ll wait a couple of months before I commit.”

      “You know I’ll call you the minute I see any new listings,” McCartin assured him. “Hey, you planning to go to J.R.’s this weekend?”

      “Yeah, maybe,” Will said, because he didn’t want to be rude.

      “Great! I’ll see you there, then.”

      Will shook his head as he hit End.

      He hadn’t slept much last night, so at noon he was on his third cup of coffee and still trying to summon some motivation to get going. When the phone rang, he snatched it up.

      “Pattons’ residence.”

      “Will?” His father’s deep voice was unmistakable. “I just talked to Meg.”

      “Are you coming home early?”

      “I’m giving the keynote address at the banquet tomorrow night. I can’t. Besides, what can I do that your mother can’t?” Still, the growl in his voice betrayed his frustration. This was his county, his command. He wanted to be there, not exchanging tips of the trade with other law enforcement personnel in Seattle.

      He wasn’t coming home early. Then what was this phone call about? Will waited.

      “You know we’re going to have to consider the possibility that Mendoza was wrongly convicted.”

      “Bullshit!” Will exploded. “You had DNA! How much more solid can you get?”

      “We had proof he’d had intercourse with Gillian,” Jack Murray corrected. “In the absence of semen or hairs from another man, it was enough. But he’s been saying since the day we picked him up that he had sex with her, and that was all.”

      “Bullshit!” Will said again. Intensely agitated, he paced the kitchen, wheeling each time he reached a wall. “Gilly wouldn’t have gone out and screwed some stranger! You knew her better than that.”

      “What I know is that she was mad as hell. People do stupid things when they’re drunk, and her blood alcohol level was sky-high.” His voice softened. “She might have done it to punish you.”

      The raging pain tore into Will’s gut, as it so often did. He stopped in his pacing and bent over as if he’d struck across the belly with a two-by-four.

      Whatever Gilly had or hadn’t intended, he had been punished a thousand times over. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe that Gilly would have been that careless with herself. That cruel to him.

      “No,” he said. “No. He did it. He raped her and killed her.”

      “Will…”

      “Copycat crimes happen. We both know they do. What if he talked some buddy into it so he could walk?”

      “Goddamn it, Will, you know we’ll consider every possibility. One of those possibilities is that we convicted the wrong man.”

      “You’re back to defending him, aren’t you? Still can’t believe you could have been wrong about him? That he was using you?”

      “That’s low.”

      “Is it?” The phone creaked, he gripped it so hard. “Funny how fast you came to the conclusion that this murder clears Mendoza.”

      “I didn’t say that—”

      “The hell you didn’t.” He pushed End and slammed the phone onto the counter. Planting both hands there, he bent his head, teeth gritted. Fury and shame and renewed grief swelled in his chest until it hurt.

      After a minute, breathing hard, he straightened. He’d been looking for motivation. Guess what. He’d just found it.

      He grabbed his parka from the coat tree, checked to be sure he had his car keys, and left the house. If he had to rent a place that stank of cat urine, he’d do it.

      Anything, to be out of here by the time his father got home on Sunday.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      TRINA AND Meg Patton, having failed to catch Doug Jennings at home, drove up to the Juanita Butte ski area on Saturday.

      The lieutenant parked in the employee lot, taking a spot right by the slope of packed snow leading up to the lodge. Since her husband was the ski area general manager, she had reason to feel at home here.

      Unlike Trina, who stepped out of the Explorer gingerly.

      Despite frostbite-inducing cold, the lift lines were long, the slopes busy enough that skiers and boarders must be having to dodge each other. Never having learned to ski, Trina felt out of place here, which made her sulky and reminded her of her teenage resentment of the popular kids. But how could she help it? In contrast to all the tanned, long-legged, bleached-blond athletes heading for the lifts, she was pasty-skinned, dark-haired and compact.

      She trailed ten feet behind Lieutenant Patton by the time they reached the A-frame that was, according to the lieutenant, the nerve center of the ski area. Ducking to save her skull from a snowboard carelessly swung by a teenage boy calling to friends above in the lift line, she slipped, knocked into a passing skier who yelled at her and finally righted herself at the foot of the snow-packed stairs leading up into the hut.

      Naturally, the information center was staffed by a tanned, Nordic blond beauty.

      “Oh, yeah! Doug’s wife! That was such a bummer. I mean, he’s going around with this tragic face.” She sounded awed at his suffering. More practically, she added, “His shift should be ending in a minute, anyway. I can call him down here.”

      She got on the radio and his crackling voice agreed that he would rendezvous with the police officers at the ski school hut.

      Stamping her feet and shivering, Trina thought about what Lieutenant Patton’s husband had said about Doug Jennings. Enthusiastic, great with the public, no apparent ambitions beyond the next ski season.

      “Of course, Scott doesn’t know him well,” she’d added. “Unless the guy had been a major problem, a lift operator is a pretty small cog in Scott’s operation.”

      Now,